Danny finished off a pair of burrowers and turned back to the wall he had been inspecting. It was old brick and twenty feet tall at least. There was no gate, which probably meant he wasn't supposed to go through here. He let his eyes trail a little higher to see the moon; it was a very depressing sight. The darkness was slowly overtaking the light, almost as he watched it seemed. It was very metaphorical of his mood.

He climbed a few rocks to the top of the wall and stood for a while. This was it, the asylum. He couldn't see it from here, but he knew these were the grounds. A pond took up most of his current field of vision with an overgrowth of brush and trees covering the rest. He lowered himself to the ground onto something that crunched underfoot, then gasped and stumbled backward as he realized he had stepped on an old skeleton. Shaking his head at his reaction, he'd seen much worse things, he turned to follow the pond around.

He saw Meryll standing on the shore by a rotted bridge that led to a collapsed gazebo. She didn't turn as he approached, and he stopped to listen. "We were married right here," she said quietly. "There was a church in town, but I always loved it here. I wanted them to fix the gazebo, but they wouldn't, so we had the service on the shore, under the night sky. And while the preacher spoke, I stared at the moon. Torn between the dark and the light, it seemed…appropriate."

She vanished, and Danny looked at the sky again. He could well imagine what the moon looked like the night she was married. As he continued, he found himself wondering when her husband first started hitting her. The beatings must have been very severe to change her from a happy, laughing child into mournfully depressed adult.

He stopped suddenly as he caught his first glimpse of the Carnate Institute for the Alienated. It was a massive, two-storey brick building surrounded by a hedge-covered wall. There were old-fashioned lanterns spaced across the wall, although they didn't work anymore. He let his eyes move up past the gothic architecture to the roof, where he could just see a figure looking down at him from what must have been the attic before it was smashed in by something.

"Silver…" he muttered in a harsh whisper.

Welcome, niño, to my humble abode. Try not to let Doc's pet slayers get you on the way in.

The front door was hanging off its hinges. Inside, there was a staircase to the left, a hall straight ahead, and an open door on the right. He could see a viewing room like the one in Abbott, but beyond it was a laboratory of some sort. He started to dash up the stairs, but they collapsed under his weight. When his vision stopped swimming around, he was in a cellar.

Watch that first step…

"Gee, thanks," Danny grumbled as he pulled himself to his feet.

Flickering yellow light announced the unwanted presence of Doctor Killjoy. "So you've come at last, my dear boy!"

"I'm not here for you," Danny said as he turned to survey his location. Rusted chains hung from the walls and the low ceiling. A series of bookshelves lay along one wall, knocked over like dominos. There was a single door; as he walked toward it, a second projector started up and displayed a gate barring the way. Try though he might, he couldn't get the door open. At last, he turned back to Killjoy, who had spent the intervening time quoting something or other.

He glanced at Danny and finished the line, then crossed his arms. "I trust you are through ignoring me?" Without waiting for a response one way or the other, he launched into his spiel. "If you truly wish to save your kin, you must first save yourself. You can never hope to defeat Silver with this attitude of melancholy. You must break free of the restraints she has placed upon you. I can give you your freedom, my dear boy, but you must first prove to me that you truly want it."

The clattering of metal on stone coincided with the doctor's disappearance, and Danny realized Silver hadn't been kidding about "pet slayers". He threw himself out of the way as one charged forward and shot an energy blast at it, then ducked around the second one. The third one didn't even get the chance to attack; when the first one charged forward again, Danny stepped out of the way at the last second, causing it to impale its brother. He blasted it a second time and the two slayers collapsed into a tangle of limbs. The remaining creature was easily defeated; the projector blocking his way wound down.

The next room was very familiar to him. He looked around to see Meryll crouched on the floor, her chains attached to the walls. She stared straight ahead, her hands stretched out as far as she could reach. "Don't leave me here!"

Danny's breath caught as the image vanished. He expected to see a skeleton chained to the wall, but even the chains had vanished. A few links lay scattered on the floor, twisted and bent open. He shook his head in confusion; if there was no body, Silver didn't die here. Then where…

"Tell me, my dear boy," Killjoy said, as though from the very walls themselves. "What do you think makes a person behave in the characteristics defined as good or evil? Is it simply that we are born a certain way? Or does the environment we live in affect what choices we make? Perhaps it is both. Or perhaps it is something…more…"

I was born on this island… Silver whispered. I was born the day Horace…heh…died. For lack of a better term. There had been a riot, so the hospital wing was full. Mother was at Abbott to be one of the witnesses. I was born in the morgue while Horace begged for someone to kill him and get it over with.

The boy chose not to respond as he climbed back upstairs. Really, what could a person say to a confession like that? Meryll met him at the top of the stairs; she turned right and walked down the hall where he lost sight of her. He past a few doors before he reach some kind of parlor. Judging by the arrangement of furniture and the fact that Killjoy was projecting himself into an easy chair that faced away from the door, it must have been where he conducted sessions once.

The door swung shut behind him and was barred by a flickering gate. A third projector created a fire in the fireplace. "Come, my boy. Sit. Tell me your troubles and marvel at the solutions I will affect."

Danny sighed and wandered around the room for a bit first. He did not want to talk to Killjoy. It occurred to him that he could simply destroy the projectors and escape, but he finally decided to try to learn something. He sat gingerly on a rotted couch. "All right, now what?"

Killjoy leaned back and manifested a clipboard. "Now, you tell me," he answered.

The boy stood again. "I don't have time for this," he said fervently. "I have to rescue my family."

"Oh? Tell me, then. Why do you have to rescue them?"

"Because Silver's going to kill them!"

"And why should that matter to you?"

"Because…" he started to yell, then stopped. In a somewhat quieter voice, he continued, "They're my family. And maybe Mom and Dad are a little weird, and maybe Jazz is too meddling and overprotective, but…I still love them. And I have to save them!"

Killjoy stood as well and set his clipboard on the table between the chairs where it promptly vanished. "Love, then, is it? Then perhaps you are not as bad as you think, hm?" The projectors wound down, and the door swung open again. As Danny stepped out, the door on his left swung open and he heard a pronounced crash. The boy rushed forward and glanced inside.

It was a dining room. A fireplace graced one wall, and the door to the kitchen was opposite it. A long table sat in the middle of the room; it had broken in half at some point. As he stepped inside, a memory began. Meryll stood between a pair of marksmen, one hand outstretched, but it wasn't the plaintive gesture he usually saw. It almost looked like an attack directed at her husband, who hung in the air, frozen at the moment of being thrown into the still intact table.

"You can't leave me," she said forcefully. "No one leaves me."

Danny wasn't sure what to make of that. It looked like Meryll had been the aggressor, but she was the victim. Wasn't she? A sudden growl drew his attention to the end of the hall where a pair of marksmen were disappearing around the corner.

Don't you just love the marksmen? I love guns and all things related to them. I have two, you know. Silver plated colts. Cobra and Mongoose; the eternal struggle…

The boy suddenly had a very bad feeling. He peeked around the hall to make sure the marksmen had gone, then followed the hall back to the foyer. He was more careful going upstairs that time. The hall led him past a series of padded rooms. A few of them were hanging open; while some were simply empty, others were covered in old blood. One gave him the image of a mother cradling her child before it vanished to be replaced by their bones. A steel crate sat at the end of the hall, blocking a closed door.

"Remember why you are here, my boy," Killjoy admonished without showing himself. "Remember why you feel the need to fight. Remember who you are behind the wall you have built as defense against our little Silver."

A trap door swung down just above the crate, and Danny climbed into the attic. Meryll met him at the top of the stairs, her expression one of the purest joy. She turned away and walked to the other end of the attic to vanish in front of a person who was sitting in the shadows just beside the moonlight from the hole in the roof. It was a woman who sat leaning back against the wall, as though in sleep. Her feet were bare; her blue jeans were so faded they had become white. Around her ankles was a pair of shackles.

The woman stretched and stood. Her wrists and neck sported shackles as well, and she wore a simple white T-shirt. Her waist-length white hair had been cut to just under her ears, but her eyes were the same shade of ice blue. "I knew you would make it," she said with a warm smile.

"Meryll…" he started to greet her, but something caught his gaze. The attic had been sectioned in half for some reason; behind a wooden fence lined with chicken wire lay Jack, Maddie, and Jazz Fenton, crumpled on the ground as though they had simply been dropped there. He stared at them for a few seconds, then his gaze shot back to the woman who was currently twirling a silver-plated colt in one hand.

It was with dawning horror he realized that one of the two people on this island he had come to think of as a friend was also the one person he hated more than anything else. Meryll…the depressed little waif he thought had been helping him…

"You're Silver?"